Both in his fiction and in his new memoir, North Country, Howard Frank
Mosher tells stories of those living in some of the wildest and most isolated parts of the
country

October 2, 1997

During the summer of his fiftieth year the novelist Howard Frank Mosher set out
to explore the whole length of the United States's northern border -- an area
known to many who live there as the North Country. In the book that resulted
from his trip, North Country: A Personal Journey Through the Borderland
(1997), Mosher describes the region as "an immense,
off-the-beaten-track sector of America inhabited by remarkably versatile,
resilient, and, most of all, independent-minded people, most of whom are still
intimately in touch with the land they live on." Mosher records and celebrates North Country lore and recounts the
tales of the people -- including smugglers, farmers, and cowboys -- he meets
along the way, all of whom share a "healthy frontier anti-authoritarianism" and
face the disappearance of their traditional ways of life.

Mosher's love of the north and his desire to preserve it in writing have been
the basis for his career as a fiction writer. For more than thirty years he and
his family have lived in a remote corner of northern Vermont often referred to as the
Northeast Kingdom, where Mosher has actively sought out from old timers stories of the area's
rugged past. From these tales have come several novels,
including Northern Borders (1994), A Stranger in the Kingdom (1989), and Disappearances (1977), and a collection of short stories, Where the Rivers Flow North
(1978), all of them set in the fictional Kingdom County, an amalgam of the
Northeast Kingdom, Quebec, northern Maine, and the Catskills (where Mosher grew
up). Mosher has won several awards for his writing, including the 1991 New
England Book Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature
Award, and a film version of A Stranger in the Kingdom, starring Martin
Sheen, will be released this winter.

"Log Drive on the Connecticut," by Robert E. Pike (July, 1963, Atlantic)
An intrepid story of the lumberjacks and rivermen who rode
the logs in the big drives through the North Country.

Before you had sold your first novel, you quit your
job as a social worker to devote yourself full-time to writing, acknowledging
that your "North Country muse was a jealous and demanding one." What is it
about the North Country that draws you?

The sheer, raw, undeveloped beauty of the place. I knew when I began taking
fishing trips up into the North Country with my father and uncle when I was
about ten years old -- just as soon as we hit the big coniferous forests of the
Adirondacks and northern Maine and Canada -- that somehow I was where I
belonged. I've often felt that it's rather like the way the geese are drawn
north in the spring. There's something instinctive that pulls me to the north,
the farther north the better. The place I felt most at home in my whole life
was Northern Labrador, and that's about as far north as you can get.

One of the things that I most like about the North Country is that there
really is lots of elbow room here for all kinds of people. It's still a very
democratic place in the most basic sense. And not an awful lot has been written
about the North Country, especially compared with places like the rural South.
Back in 1964, when I first came to the Northeast Kingdom, I felt like a gold
miner who had hit a mother lode. There were all these wonderful stories, a lot
of them dating back to the Depression era and earlier, that hadn't been written
before. I was determined from the start to write them.

Does your fiction come mostly from stories that you've heard, then?

Definitely. Although I put my stories through multiple drafts, often forty or
fifty, most of them are inspired by actual events in this area and certainly
most of the characters are known well around here. For example, one of the
stories in Where the Rivers Flow North was "Burl," which was about a
woman who saves her Depression-era farm by manufacturing moonshine and then
marries the federal agent who caught her doing it and let her go. She was our
first landlady when my wife and I came to Vermont. Though I changed the names
and some details, that story is almost literally true. A Stranger in the
Kingdom is based on a very ugly racist event that took place in my hometown of
Irasburg.

You describe the North Country as "a vast and little-known territory so
distinct from the rest of the United States that it has a special name of its own."
What -- aside from geography -- sets the North Country apart?

One thing that sets it apart is the unforgiving climate -- by early
September this year we'd already had a couple of severe frosts in northern
Vermont. That means you can't grow alfalfa here, you can't grow wheat here.
Farmers have to buy their grain. It's a tough place to make a living and always
has been. We have frosts well into June, and we usually have frosts again in
August; snow comes in late October and usually stays until the middle of May.
It's difficult, practically speaking, for farmers who can't be on the land but
it's also difficult psychologically to have seven-month winters. It doesn't matter
how long you live here -- that can be a problem.

What sets the area apart most is its people. Sometimes North Country
people are perceived, even by those in their own states, as quaint and
eccentric, even wrong-headed. A man I met in Maine told me,
"People in the state capital in Augusta think that their main obligation is to
save us from ourselves." The North Country certainly has its own share of
outlaws and survivalists, but most of the people I met on my trip were very
hardworking, serious, intelligent people who were trying somehow to make a
living from the land, even though that's getting more difficult every day. Many
of them were still doing traditional kinds of work that their ancestors had
done, like farming, lumbering, ranching, and mining. It was this contact, this
interdependence between the people of the North Country and the land, that
seemed to me to set them apart.

While many of the people you meet on your journey cannot imagine living
anywhere else but the North Country, your book tells a tale of shrinking towns,
fished-out waters, and no-longer-profitable farms. What do you see as the North
Country's future?

I think the future, if we're not very careful to protect the land, is going to
be bleak. I'm glad I took the trip when I did because I think in ten or twenty
years a great deal isn't going to look the same as it does now. I saw all kinds
of indications that the country is going to be developed, through vacation
homes, through more resorts and fewer farms. One of the problems I
saw in the North Country is that many professions are becoming obsolete,
including railroading -- which was once a way of life in the North Country and
elsewhere but scarcely exists at all now -- and mining, and, most of all,
farming. When I first came to northern Vermont there were between 600 and 700
family farms just in the county where I lived. Today there are fewer than 200.
Of course, what's happening is that people are leaving because work simply
isn't available. At one time it was possible for a person to get by being a
jack-of-all-trades. You could make a pretty decent living by doing some
blueberrying, putting out a few lobster traps, collecting firewood, netting
sardines. You can't do that anymore, here or anyplace else. I'm reminded of a
Wallace Stegner quote about the Montana-Saskatchewan border territory, where he
grew up: "I can't think of a better place for a boy to grow up or a
less-satisfactory place for a man to live." I think that's true of the entire
North Country. There's little for a man or woman to do unless they go and get
an education and come back and find some way to apply it.

In a recent review of North Country, James Reaney wrote in the Ottawa
Citizen, "What Mosher's journey is really about is our society's loss of
Eden, the garden we were promised when we came here. The garden we've turned
into pulp fiction and rocket ranges." Is this what your journey was about? Was
there ever an Eden to be lost?

To a large extent, yes, that is what my trip was about -- and I think in some
ways that's what all my fiction is about. There's a great deal of Eden-like
wilderness left in northern Maine, Minnesota, Montana, and there's some here in
northern Vermont, but it's being exploited to an astonishing and alarming
degree. In Maine and Montana, I found clearcuts as large as small cities, and
although it can be argued that it doesn't hurt the woods, it does hurt the
wildlife and the fishing. I found slag piles as large as mountains from copper
mines, coal mines, iron mines. I asked myself whether our country was ever
really an Eden, and I think the answer is yes and no. It was beautiful and wide
open but also harsh and dangerous. I was struck recently while reading
Meriwether Lewis's journals by how a tiny miscalculation -- just getting caught
out in a September blizzard or not properly respecting the force of a river you
had to cross -- could result in the loss of your life. So it was an Eden, but a
dangerous one.

The New Hampshire novelist Ernest Hebert has said that you "invented the 'Eastern.'" What do you think about this characterization? Is
there an "Eastern" culture or way of life that you're trying to preserve?

I think what he was referring to was the high-action, picaresque stories that I
write that are comparable to Westerns, but set in the East. It's certainly true
that I've been attracted to violent scenes like the whiskey running in
Disappearances, the log driving in Where the Rivers Flow North,
and the frontier-town violence that you see in A Stranger in the
Kingdom (which is brought forward even more in Jay Craven's film
version). The character of these books has a lot in common with Bud Guthrie's
The Big Sky and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Is there
an eastern culture? Well, I think there's a North Country culture that includes
Yankee traditions and French Canadian traditions. And although preserving that
has never been my main objective -- my main objective, like every other fiction
writer, is to tell a good story with interesting characters -- I do nonetheless
want to preserve this French Canadian-Yankee culture in my writing. This is the
culture of the hill farmers, many of whom I met when I moved to Vermont in the
mid-1960s, who are gone now.

You set off on your trip "determined to make this intensely personal journey
one of exuberance and affirmation rather than lament and nostalgia." Your
fiction affirms the belief in human strength and self-sufficiency, yet there is
a distinct streak of melancholy running through it. How do you reconcile the
joy you sought on your journey with the darkness that often comes out in your
fiction?

I don't. My fiction is one thing and the joy that I sought on my trip is
something else again. In my fiction, in my "Easterns," the frontiersmen and
frontierswomen whom I write about are constantly confronted with change. I
think of Noel Lord in Where the Rivers Flow North who is faced with a
power dam that's going to flood out his ancestral land, but also with the end
of a way of life -- sending logs down the river -- that really isn't practical
anymore. One central thematic question in my fiction is, What do you do when
you're confronted with change and can't really live the lifestyle that your
ancestors lived and that you want to live? Well, many of my characters resist.
But most of the people I met on my trip and most of the people here in the
Northeast Kingdom adjust. They have to adjust. The young people, for the most
part, move. The Native Americans open casinos and use the proceeds to start
other businesses. These aren't necessarily people I would write fiction about,
though, because in fiction you need dramatic conflict.

Nature is almost its own character in your writing, through the hold it
exerts on those you write about. What was it like for you to see your
descriptions of the natural world in Where the Rivers Flow North and
A Stranger in the Kingdom rendered cinematically?

I was wonderfully fortunate in that both the screenwriter, Don Bredes, and the director, Jay
Craven, live in the Northeast Kingdom, so they're both attached
to it and to the natural world. I very much wanted the movie to be filmed in
Vermont by a Vermont filmmaker, particularly Jay Craven. I accepted very early
on, as every writer who goes through this experience has to, that there would
certainly be some differences in story and plot. There's tremendous difference
between a 420-page novel and a 100-page screenplay for a ninety-minute movie.
But I knew that Jay Craven would stay very close to my characters, as I'm
delighted to report that he did. Both are gorgeous movies and are evocative of
nature in the Northeast Kingdom. So for me the movies were a wonderful
experience.

Many of the stories in Where the Rivers Flow North concentrate on people
who have chosen to remove themselves from society. Similarly, you have removed
yourself in some ways from the literary world -- by choosing to live where you
do, by choosing not to do extensive publicity tours. Why did you make these
choices and how have they affected your career as a writer?

I never intended originally to remove myself from the literary world. In fact I
began as a high school teacher. Throughout my twenties I intended to become a
college literature teacher and short-story writer. In 1969 I had rather a
transforming experience: I went to California for a writing program at UC
Irvine and felt desperately cut off from my material. I spent three days there
and came home to Vermont, where I went to work in the woods with Jake Blodgett,
a woodsman who turned out to be the inspiration for Noel Lord in Where the
Rivers Flow North. I liked teaching. In fact, I liked it a little too much
and spent too much time at it. I didn't see how in the world I could write
about the Northeast Kingdom and continue to acquire fresh material while
teaching. A classroom just didn't seem like the right place for me to do that.
I know many writers do it successfully, but unless you take teaching as your
subject, as Richard Russo did wonderfully in his recent novel Straight Man, I think there is the danger of being cut off from the kind of
material that novelists write best about. Certainly in my case I couldn't have
worked with Blodgett and taught at the same time.

There's another danger with teaching, a more subtle one: it's pretty easy for a
teacher -- and it may even be necessary -- to start developing and expanding
theories about "how it's done." How do you write fiction? Well, if you're
teaching fiction-writing every day you're going to have some strong ideas about
it. That's fine for a critic and fine for a teacher, but I believe -- and I
think most writers in their heart of hearts know -- that there really isn't any
workable theory about how it's done. Every day a writer has to sit down and
learn all over again. Just because you've written five novels doesn't mean you
can write a sixth. So I think the choice I made to leave the academic
community, to be very careful about not becoming overcommitted to the literary
world, was a very conscious one that kept me close to the place I write about.
It wouldn't have been the right choice for every writer.